40/100 Startups fm Y-Combinator’s Smr 2020 Demo Day 1
“Take a look at these and you might get an Idea (if you don’t have one already) of a Startup that you could do”. Peter/CXO Wiz4.biz
Startup Types: Podcast, Charity, Pay, Cloud, Shop’g, Order, Ag, IDE, Vids 4 Kids, AI, Content, DB, Sharing, SaaS, Map App, Spt, ERP, P/Mgt, Chat, B2B, Conference, Home Sch & many more.
Y Combinator’s two-part Summer 2020 Demo Day, where nearly 100 companies debuted their startups to the world for the first time. This batch of companies was the first fully remote YC group, because of the ongoing Pandemic – leading the Y accelerator to take its program entirely virtual.
YC’s Demo Day experience is more in line with that of the in-person events. In an incredibly rapid-fire series of live pitches, each company got just 60 seconds to pitch to an audience of Investors, Media, & fellow Founders; it was enough to present an Intro of who they are and what they do, but the often had to leave the deeper details of how\why for follow-up conversations.
Wiz4.biz (s) 40 favorite Co’s of Day #1
Akiflow: A command line-style tool for building quick shortcut commands across things like Email, Google Drive, Slack, or Asana. Available on Windows/Mac. Currently has 2000 users wait-listed.
Artifact: Everyone has people and events they’d like to preserve forever. Artifact aids in the creation of a “Personal Podcast” in which a professional interviewer speaks with someone like your grandparents to get their stories on the record so your grandkids can listen to it without hearing your dog bark in the background.
Charityvest: When rich folks give money away, they often use a donor advised fund, or what Charityvest calls a “a 401K or HSA, but for supporting charities.” The startup’s service allows companies to offer donor advised funds to folks in the middle classes, as an employee benefit. The company has rang up $65,000 in ARR ($5,400 in MRR) thus far. Many big companies match employee donations to some degree. Perhaps this is the obvious next step in that particular progression.
ChatPay: ChatPay is building a Substack for WhatsApp, building out a platform that allows people to create exclusive WhatsApp chat channels while allowing admins to monetize the platform via member management.
Clew: We live on so many different cloud-based platforms, from Google Docs to Figma to Github and Dropbox. Clew wants to be the company that helps you streamline all your different cloud-based applications into a single-stream platform that works as a filing system. So far, Clew has lined up 85 paying customers and charges a $50 annual subscription fee.
Drapr: Drapr is building SW to help online shoppers see what their clothing looks like. The company’s online try-on widget helps shoppers get a better idea of how a shirt or other clothing item fits on a customizable 3D Mannequin that users can adjust to fit their body type, height & weight.
Eatable: Building “Order-ahead” functionality into restaurant workflows, allowing them to sidestep pen-and-paper order taking over the phone and streamline operations.
Fig: Fig is building an App Store for the terminal that allows developers to access lightweight graphical interfaces for common integrations without leaving terminal. These integrations can be further dialed in by the startup’s Teams product that allows Engineering teams to quickly access internal tools and share workflows.
Future Fields: Cellular Agriculture, the science that powers lab-grown meat and other meat alternatives, often struggles to get into consumer homes due to a high cost of production. Future Fields sells cell-growth media products that are more cost effective and scalable than the status quo set forward by commercialized agriculture.
GitDuck: A video chat tool built specifically for developers. It hooks directly into a developer’s IDE to allow for real-time code sharing, allowing devs to code together remotely. Only charges $20 per developer seat.
Glimpse: helps consumer brands place products in Airbnbs that are part of the Glimpse network. They gets paid by the brands, and the brands themselves get to put their goods in front, or in the hands of consumers in the market today. If folks who rent Airbnbs are your jam, then Glimpse might be a good alternative to retail. How inventory is managed and so forth wasn’t mentioned, but if Airbnb is on the way back up, perhaps it’s a good moment for them to unify the house-sharing & consumer D2C boom into a single experience.
Hellosaurus: With YouTube making monetization of kids’ content more difficult, there are lots of creators looking to take the next step. Hellosaurus has signed a bunch of them to create an interactive video platform for children, who can play with episodes instead of just watching. It’s a crowded market but with HQ Trivia’s former head of product and some solid creators they may be able to slice off a piece of that $3B market.
Hubble: (to keep you humble) Instead of manually tracking data quality, what if software could automatically do that for you? Hubble monitors a company’s data warehouse for errors and missing information, letting in-house engineers focus their time on other tasks. The company launched 3 weeks ago and has three customers. It plans to charge $10,000 per team per year.
HumanLoop: Building software to annotate, train, and deploy natural language processing atop thorny data sets. The startup is bringing specialized AI to lawyers, doctors, & accountants to process their data, which otherwise would need to be out-sourced to pricey domain experts.
In Stock: As the coronavirus pandemic keeps local retail stores shuttered, In Stock wants to bring delivery services that don’t just compete, but beat, Amazon Prime. The startup helps retail stores offer same-day delivery, at a cheaper price than Amazon Prime. After launching 6 weeks ago in Santa Cruz, In Stock has positive unit economics. In Stock is currently doing 10 orders per day, and per founder Ian McHenry, it is not scared of Amazon.
Jemi: A platform meant to help Content creators sell experiences (they mention video calls/ shoutouts) & merch to their fans. Currently taking a 15% cut of transactions, the team says they’re currently seeing a GMV of ~$17,000 and growing 30% week-over-week.
Jika: Jika wants to help the average Shopify seller do price testing. The startup said during its pitch that the major online retailers have teams of folks working on pricing. Many smaller Shopify sellers do not change their pricing at all. As we’ve seen from Shopify’s recent quarter, the potential market for Jika’s service is pretty big and growing quickly. Still, Jika is a small thing today, with less than $1,000 MRR today. From small seeds, big trees. Let’s see how quickly Jika can grow its footprint in the Shopify seller market.
kSense: Companies need to collect lots of data in-house, but often need to work with a third party to do so. That’s not always practical, as these CTOs found out in their own companies – so they built this tool to perform data collection internally using an Open Source core.
KeyDB: a NoSQL database that the team says is “up to 5x faster” than Redis. The company notes that it’s currently seeing over 40,000 downloads per month, and named HP Enterprise as an early customer.
KiteKRAFT: KiteKRAFT builds flying wind turbines, with the goal of creating a more viable wind power system for businesses. The startup claims that its wind turbine uses 10 times less material at half the cost of traditional options, and has already flown a 7-foot wide prototype. KiteKRAFT’s first use case is micro-grids, small energy networks that are normally powered by diesel generators and/or solar energy.
Layer: A developer tool that creates Staging Environments quickly, so that developers can immediately see/compare/share the impact of code changes. Layer notes that its service allows developers at smaller companies to have access to a similar workflow as the major tech companies of the world. Per the startup, 18 customers have used its service 6,000 times in the last 30 days.
Mailwarm: The founders of Mailwarm in their previous companies used Email as their main line of communication with customers, but found that even “legit” marketing Emails were relegated to the Spam folder 20 % of the time. Mailwarm is the tool they developed to prevent this from happening, and they’re seeing big organic growth and $50K in MRR after just a few months online.
Manycore: Companies produce lots of code that runs on Cloud Computing resources,but if that code isn’t efficient, it racks up costs correspondingly. Manycore takes final code — first Java, and soon Python & JS, and optimizes it for Cloud deployment.
Mesh: A “social network for remote companies”, allowing employees to share what they’re working on, see each other’s progress, and share feedback. It’s currently free for teams with fewer than 10 employees, with plans starting at $5 per employee per month after that. Working with 8 enterprise pilots.
MilkRun: MilkRun is a service that connects folks in a city to local food products, like dairy and produce. It scaled to $425,000 in GMV per month in Portland before setting its sights on Seattle. In the more northern rainy city, MilkRun racked up $62,000 MRR in its first six weeks. Echoing the famous Amazon threat that “your margin is my opportunity,” MilkRun said that most money spent on food today goes to packaging and distribution, and that “that inefficiency is [its] opportunity.”
Mozart Data: Everything is SaaS now, which means companies may have their data spread over half a dozen tools from Salesforce, Stripe, & so on. Mozart Data collects, organizes, & manages all that data in one place, with no data engineering skills required, in about an hour. The team previously built data tools for companies like Yammer, Clover, Opendoor & others and hope to bring that expertise to growing Enterprises looking to scale fast.
Nototo: is building a Visual Map Interface for note-taking, bringing a very unique interface to a productivity vertical known for its innovative App designs. The app basically encourages users to organize their maps geographically rather than sticking them in nested bullet points & folders.
Omni: Helps sales & support teams get up-to-date and accurate answers for their customers. While a rep is on a call, Omni searches across tools to answer customer questions and confirm if information is accurate & up to date. Think of it as a smarter way to answer burning questions, without having to mine through old Slack conversations for the latest updated information. After launching two months ago, Omni has landed $80,000 in pilot programs from Dave, Notion, and Parsable.
Once: A Shopify storefront optimized for mobile. The startup is trying to funnel E-commerce traffic into mobile purchases, which is not currently as seamless as the desktop experience. By using Instagram stories, Once has created 12 mobile storefronts. The flagship customer has increased conversation rate by 70 percent.
PolyOps: SaaS business that provides analytics on E-commerce operations including visibility into returns, shipping & customer acquisition expenses. The startup wants to make E-commerce more efficient. PolyOps claims 15 brands are already onboard with a combined $35 million in GMV. As commerce of all sorts changes, PolyOps is trying to make the world a bit easier to grok, which seems like a smart direction to proceed.
Queue: Real-time collaboration & feedback SW for Video producers & editors. Allows groups to drop feedback & time-stamped comments into the Video Timeline, or draw notes/concepts directly on the video.
Rally: During the pandemic, Zoom has turned out to be a necessary tool for web users trying to stay in touch with friends. Zoom was built for enterprise; Rally is aiming to create a Video Chat platform built for social gatherings. The app has shifted the idea of a breakout room, aiming to replicate the experience of sparking up side conversations by allowing you to faintly overhear some of the conversation happening “nearby”.
Recurrency: This startup is building an “automated” ERP [Enterprise Resource Planning] service, for wholesalers. So far it appears to be working, with Recurrency growing from $0 to $17,000 in MRR during its time at Y Combinator. Per its quick talk, the company has found hundreds of thousands of potential customers.
Sameplan: According to the founders, Sales Reps are basically Project Managers, but lack the tools PMs usually use to do the job. Sameplan aims to help Sales teams share & synchronize data between deals & projects in an organized way, replacing endless Email threads & spreadsheets. Heap, Okta & Front have bit for the alpha.
Sidekick: Standalone, “always-on” video Chat hardware meant to help remote teams keep in touch. Charges $50 per user per month.
SiPhox: A circuit board for optical chips. The startup wants to replace refrigerator-sized diagnostic machines with a tiny chip. It’s first product is a $1 COVID test on a disposable cartridge.
Tella: Tella is building a way to collaboratively edit video from a browser-based application. The startup, which was founded in May, wants to compete with Quicktime & Loom with an easier-to-use Edit platform. It helps you piece together video clips from screen & camera recordings – currently reporting 100 weekly users.
Together Video Chat: For kids, Facetime & Zoom might not be the most engaging way to communicate. TVC wants to bring an interactive element to video chatting between families & kids, like reading a book or playing games over the screen. The startup is making $17,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
Vectrix: As companies grow, they constantly accrue Cloud services & other tools, and with them the possibility of Security problems among & between them. Normally, the company’s own Security engineers would develop their own methods of scanning & monitoring for security issues, but Vectrix provides a marketplace for these processes so they can be set up faster and easier.
Workbase: A data visualization & analytics tool for account/growth teams, meant to “help B2B companies reduce churn and grow customer spending”. They currently have 3 contracts after launching in May 2020.
Zuddl: Zuddl is a startup that aims to bring conferences online for big companies. It charges $5 per attendees, and per its pitch has already managed to host a conference with a few thousand attendees. A bit like competitors Hopin and others, Zuddle wants to re-create some familiar in-person scenarios like booths, and lobbies for chatting. Zuddl stands out for racking up $54,000 in revenue in about a month, which, annualized, makes it one of the larger startups demo’g.
ZipSchool: Every parent is worried about their kid’s education this year and the amount of time that those same children are spending on screens. ZipSchool is one of the hotter companies that demo’d today, we’re told — is Home-School for kids, on screens, via Zoom. So, it’s screen time, but useful. Its site notes topics that kids might find engaging like art, space, & weather. It’s 2020 with a pandemic & recession, so parents have had to park Kidlets with tablets on couches. Why not make that time a bit more constructive?
Comments: Was there any other Startups that really impressed you?
fm Tech Crunch 9/20 enhanced by Peter/CXO Wiz4.biz
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